Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Anyone who teaches Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass will be familiar with students asking, often within the first ten minutes of a seminar, some variation on that enduring question: "Was Dodgson dodgy?" As a result, most tutors find themselves embroiled in discussions about the validity of exploring the text in the light of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's notorious interest in young girls. In these instances, instructors do well to call upon Karoline Leach's observation that "beyond the familiar story of 'little girls,' primness, virginity and reclusive weirdness, [Dodgson's] documented life seems rich, adult, replete with evidence of broad-mindedness, ambiguity and tolerance" (15). Nevertheless, escaping from the pervasive Carroll myth has long been difficult for scholars and students of Alice, not least because of the apparent dualities of Carroll and Dodgson himself.

As Cristopher Hollingsworth notes in his introduction, it is appropriate that Leach offers a preface to Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. Just as Leach sought to challenge traditional views about Carroll, this volume explores what Hollingsworth terms "the Wonderland complex." As he rightly observes, "Whatever was 'in' Carroll's books has been free and busy in the wider world for some time" (xix), and thus the task becomes not to measure Carroll's predilections but to explore the large and abstract cultural system "organized around the 'story space' of Wonderland" (xix). The project of the volume is therefore an ambitious one. The editor recognizes the facts that the Alice books are "ontologically variegated" (xxi) and defy "a singular unifying perspective" (xxii), and that the approach to them must be "bold, inclusive, and experimental" (xxii). The collection is thus divided into three sections on Literature, Image, and Culture—divisions that are not especially bold or experimental, but which seek to examine Carroll's fiction with fresh eyes. The essays are all gathered (in some cases rather loosely) around the topic of space, perhaps anticipating (although not mentioning) Gillian Beer's own Wonderland study, Alice in Space (U of Chicago P, forthcoming).

Hollingsworth suggests that the collection is organized "to accord with the opening arc of Alice's Adventures, a defining movement from the mundane to the wonderful that is known to nearly everyone" (xxii). The worrisome implication here is that the first section of the book might accord with the implied mundane start to Alice's journey. Thankfully, Hollingsworth tempers his statement, suggesting that "[t]hough my 'path to Wonderland' treats narrative literature as old-fashioned, the five texts gathered under this rubric are anything but" (xxiii). Indeed, the Literature section tackles topics ranging from hyperspace philosophy in the Alice books to reading Alice's Adventures and Looking-Glass from the perspective of old age rather than youth. In the opening essay, "Underworld Portmanteaux: Dante's Hell and Carroll's Wonderland in Women's Memoirs of Mental Illness," Rachel Falconer explores how Carroll's Wonderland space is "portmanteau-ed" (using Humpty Dumpty's expression) with the imagery of Dante's Hell in contemporary women's autobiographies. Falconer suggests that the effect of yoking together the underworlds of Carroll and Dante is "to produce a complex underworld space that is at once authorizing and radicalizing, punishing and (potentially) ludic" (3). The essay principally explores these issues in Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), a text written by a then twenty-three-year-old about her remarkable girlhood, but also draws upon a wider range of autobiographical and semi-fictional memoirs. For Falconer, the hybridization of austere Dantean allusion with the playful child-centered Alice creates a type of écriture feminine in which young women might locate meaning, learn survival, and reflect on their experiences of the metaphorical underworld of mental illness.

As in most critical collections, there is some fluctuation in the relevance of the essays, and the second contribution by Christine Roth, "Looking Through the Spyglass: Lewis Carroll, James Barrie, and the Empire of Childhood," offers a somewhat less...